Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,211

the terrible cold of the winter, still iron down in the earth; and Eddie was reminded of a sudden friendship with a guy in exile from the Cameroons he’d got to know in Algeria, for two weeks they’d argued over political groupings in Africa – and now it was a long time since he’d thought of the conclusions they’d been excited over. The silence would come back, broken by some floating reflection from Eddie (‘It’s true . . . they say in these very cold countries the earth stays frozen deep down’); and then holding once more.

After Charles, a white man and conspicuous, couldn’t come to them, Eddie went at night across the veld all the way to the main road to take water from the backyard tap of an Indian store. He went there during the late afternoon and bought sugar and cigarettes, returning when it was safe, after dark. Vusi could have done without both, but said nothing to stop him. Since he had taken the liberty of wandering about the city that time, it was as if Eddie assumed it was accepted he had a charmed life. Anyway, smelling of earth and unwashed clothes, now, he was only one of the farm labourers who crowded the store for matches and mealie-meal, soap and sugar, and were given a few cheap sweets in lieu of small change. He brought back with him chewing-gum, samoosas, and some magazines published by whites for blacks – smiling black girls opened their legs on the covers. Vusi did not pass time with magazines and did not miss the books he had carried with him, hidden, across frontiers. He needed nothing. If the girl, Joy, could have seen him she would have seen that he had become one with that face of his.

Eddie amused himself, opening with a thumbnail some tiny white ovoid beads he found in a crevice of warm rock. Out of them the two men saw come transparent but perfect miniatures of the adult lizard. Their tender damp membrane could scarcely contain the pulse of life, but under the men’s eyes they slid away to begin to live.

Mrs Lily Scholtz was hanging on the line the lilac nylon capes the clients of ‘Chez Lily’, her hairdressing salon, are given to wear, and which she brings home to pop into the washing machine every Sunday. Her husband, Bokkie, former mining shift-boss turned car salesman, was helping their neighbour with the vehicle he is building for drag racing. Mrs Scholtz heard the dustbin lid clang and thought her cat, named after a TV series Mrs Scholtz hadn’t missed an episode of, some years back, was in there again. The dustbin is kept between the garage and the maid’s room where Bokkie Scholtz does carpentry – his hobby; Patience Ngulungu doesn’t live in, but comes to work from Naledi Township weekdays only. Mrs Scholtz found the lid off the bin but no sign of Dallas. As she bent to replace the lid, something landed on her back and bit her just below the right shoulder. Out of nowhere – as she was to relate many times. First thing she knew, there was this terrible pain, as if her arm were torn off – but it wasn’t; without even realising that she did it, she had swung back with that same arm, holding the metal lid, at what had bitten her, just as you swat wildly at a bee. She did not hit anything; when she turned round there it was – she saw a big grey monkey already up on the roof of the garage. It was gibbering and she was screaming, Bokkie, Bokkie.

Mr Bokkie Scholtz said his blood ran cold. You know what Johannesburg is like these days. They are everywhere, loafers, illegals, robbers, murderers, the pass laws are a joke, you can’t keep them out of white areas. He was over the wall from his neighbour’s place and took the jump into his own yard, God knows how he didn’t break a leg. And there she was with blood running down and a big grey baboon on the roof. (His wife refers to all these creatures as monkeys.) The thing was chattering, its lips curled back to show long fangs – that’s what it’d sunk into her shoulder, teeth about an inch and a half long – can you imagine? He just wanted to get his wife safely out of the way, that’s all. He pushed her into the kitchen and